[WikiEN-l] fictional categories

[David Goodman]

Fiction is a very broad term. fictions can be used for rhetorical
purposes in serious discourse--fictional examples are a mainstay of
philosophical argument, dating back to Plato's cave, if not earlier.

For this hypothetical animal, I do not think there will be any
difficulty finding a citation that says that it is a fiction.


David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Surreptitiousness
<surreptitious.wikipedian at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I freely admit I have an issue with fictional categories. I find them
> somewhat in the face of what categorisation was intended to do, or at
> least my thoughts on what it was intended to do, which was to classify
> as unambiguously and as relevantly as possible.  I'm prompted into this
> steam-letting by the discovery that Schrödinger's cat is categorised as
> a fictional cat.  I'm half tempted to slap a citation needed on that
> one. It's an interesting conundrum which for me highlights the issues
> with categorising fictional elements. It's a problem I guess we at the
> comics project face more than some, although not as often as others.  It
> has been a battle avoiding category bloat on Batman especially. The
> problem is where to stop.  We have characters by nationality, which to
> me seems absurd since you find Mandarin (comics) nestling in
> Category:English people because his mother was English.  Now
> sidestepping the fact that a fictional character doesn't exist, let
> alone have a mother, how can we know this character identifies as
> English? Gosh darn it's a tricky beast.  One day I'll write an essay on
> the matter. Apologies for ranting. Now, can someone set up a bot which
> will add or remove Schrödinger's cat to the fictional cat category every
> other day please.
>
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